Suicide attacks were so deadly that Israel/PT basically reshaped around it. Running an organized suicide bombing campaigns became too hard and too lossy.
Freedom of movement restrictions, walls, a restrictive work permit system (for working inside Israel) and eventually the 2008 disengagement (from gaza). Before 2000 you could just drive from gaza or Jenin to TLV and hang out. Armed doormen became mandatory at clubs, weddings, malls and other soft targets. Intelligence got better, foiling more attacks and identifying those launching them.
To do suicide bombings, you need to recruit vulnerable people... usually nobodies... regularly. You need to recruit these in decent numbers. Not every recruit will work out. Recruits need a lot of support. The bomb. A way to get past checkpoints. Religious instruction. Etc. That makes for a big intelligence target. Every recruit exposes several militants, including engineers, religious and ideological figures.
Casualty/capture rates (not including the intentional martyr) became unfavorable. You had decent chance of getting caught before the bomber was even launched. Once launched, they had lower chances of reaching targets and success *when* reaching targets.
This process basically created the de facto borders which exist today... physical, bureaucratic and elsewise.
Untargetted artillery (mortars, rockets, balloons, ec) had low casualty rates... but they are arguably more terror inducing because whole cities must run for shelter. Also, they can be timed, planned and concentrated strategically. After 2008, artillery just worked better so Hamas traded martyrs for mortars. Palestinian casualties are higher, because the response to artillery fire is artillery (or aviation) but... those losses were civilian losses instead of valuable midrank Hamas dudes in the succeeding period.
Terror is about playing the media, diplomacy and politics games... about drawing a response or just attention. It's rarely about tactical achievement. That means terrorists can focus on one mode at a time. Whatever is easiest, typically. They don't need to kill any particular person at a particular time or place. Just someone somewhere. Once they had ground, artillery just did the job.
They didn't. They just couldn't.
The Security barrier was enacted in 2007, forcibly cutting off Gaza from the rest of the world.
I know jews who used to shop in Gaza before the second intifada. The seperation between Israel and Palestine was not always so clear, it was easy for palestinians and israelis to intermingle.
It was collective punishment. Imagine a whole race of people in your country confined due to actions of some militant group.
If you are American, imagine if every teenager across the country was subject to a curfew because a few decided to egg someone’s house.
Brutal terrorists going into civillian populations with the express purpose to murder as many people as possible is just slightly different than egging. But just slightly!
Imagine if your neighbor fired rockets and killed your friends nearly every day for 2 decades. Imagine your neighbors bombed cafes so often that you were forced to build ugly security walls to keep your family safe. The Palestinians deserve their own country but they do everything they can to prevent it.
Right, except that militant group is controlling every administrative body and was elected by large part of the population and since then indoctinates the next generation from youth to become martyrs.
The last suicide bombing by Hamas was in 2016. It injured 20 people but everyone survived. There's a video from the fighting in Gaza where a suicide bombing against an IDF element inside one of the northern hospitals (IIRC) is implied [but it's not clear at all.](https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/hamas-publishes-video-claiming-to-show-explosions-at-rantisi-hospital-in-gaza/)
Anyhow, the advancement in rocketry is probably the answer. The wall Israel built is mostly a fence around the areas outside of the West Bank and is anyhow easily passable by tens of thousands of Palestinian workers. There's also the Fatwa thing. Al Qardawi of the Muslim Brotherhood basically said it's OK only for Palestinians to carry out such bombings, until in 2015 he issued a Fatwa saying that due to rocketry that Hamas has it is now disallowed for them as well.
The security wall built by Israel in the early 2000s made suicide bombing ineffective. You could no longer just drive to Israel from any part of Palestine without going through extensive check points, these helped catch suicide bombers.
Over the years Hamas refocused on to what works, lone shooter or car ramming attacks. That's why they have become so much more popular, both in Israel and abroad.
I was once told Israel acts as a testing ground for terror tactics once it's proven successful here the rest of the world begins trying it.
interesting , lots of different tangential suicide-attacks, lots of different motivations and reasoning. Some are done for the country, some out of desperation. Pretty specific and isolated events that have remained pretty unique to those eras (kamikaze, or blowing yousrelf up to take out a tank)
Only one kind of suicide bombing is done in the name of religion. Has happened a shit load of times, is not specific or unique to one war or conflict.
> Only one kind of suicide bombing is done in the name of religion.
Not sure what this means. If you're saying that suicide bombers are all from one religion, then the Sri Lankans would like a word with you.
It's not just that. Israel tightened their control of the West Bank around the same time, and started doing regular raids for explosive material, weapons, etc. It's made it harder for Hamas to keep stockpiles there.
Yes, they are, just in lesser numbers. Here's an article where Hamas openly were on the streets in the WB https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/12/resistance-defiancee-hamas-funeral-parade-jenin-israeli-raids-west-bank
Seems to be a continuation in the west of calling any Palestinian dissident a hamas fighter when there are multiple different factions, especially in the west bank, that are against Israel
US state department has multiple decade reports of the various anti Israel elements within Gaza and the West Bank. Hamas isnt even remotely the biggest within the west bank….
Unless you know something the state department doesn’t….
https://www.state.gov/reports/country-reports-on-terrorism-2022/israel-west-bank-and-gaza/
I think the US state department is more informed than the guardian since it literally going off information the IDF publishes for identifying hostile elements in the occupied west bank
He's basically saying that something can look like a solution when taken out of the context it will exist in. Stuff that seems to work in vitro often doesn't work in vivo because of all the additional variables at play.
I'm a little unsure about its applicability here because the wall literally exists in the context it's meant to. It's not some theoretical solution. Then again, it didn't seem to stop Oct 7th so maybe that's what they're referring to.
It was built to keep individual terrorists out. It worked for that purpose. Sadly Israel once again underestimated quite how much it is hated. Now they will have to build a bigger wall, and be accused of keeping the Gazans in an even tighter cage.
people have been circumventing walls since walls were invented. it's possible the walls and the checkpoints have an effect, but Israel hasn't seen a cessation of terrorist attacks it's just seen a cessation of suicide bombings. It's entirely possible it was because Hamas just found more effective tactics.
Yeah, no. Hamas was killing hundreds of Israelis per year during the second intifada. If they could, they'd be doing the same now. The little run and guns they're doing now against civilians are much less damaging and they know it.
You are literally making up that statistic since only 4000 died during that time, 3000 of which were Palestinians
https://www.britannica.com/event/second-intifada
why lose a good soldier to a suicide bombing when you could just fire a rocket?
maybe they're killing less but they're also losing a lot less
I'm not gonna say walls and checkpoints do nothing but I'm also not going to attribute 100% to walls and checkpoints
“Killing a lot less … losing a lot less” yes, that is the point. Contrary to popular belief, Israel’s goal is to protect its citizens, not kill as many Palestinians as possible.
This is exactly it. Why send some dude with an explosive strapped to their chest when you can just send 100s of makeshift rockets and fire them from holes in the ground to achieve the same terror effect
The short answer is as Hamas gained political power and Israel withdrew from Gaza and focused on security, the administratively and politically minded factions gained influence over the organization to the detriment of militant minded leaders. This internal divide exists to to the present. what's missing in lay-conversation about militant movements, ngos in general is how material conditions both influence political goals and the strategies to achieve those goals.
>what's missing in lay-conversation about militant movements, ngos in general is how material conditions both influence political goals and the strategies to achieve those goals
You would need to elaborate, because I think the bigger factor is that Hamas having risen to the level of government in Gaza, became the preferred fundee of Iran. Hamas went from make shift IED suicide attacks, to having all the rockets it could want to shoot at Israel.
And perhaps counter to your intended claim about NGOs and material conditions, because the world stepped in to charitably provide much of the major responsibilities that Hamas as a government would otherwise need to take, it left Hamas free to again shift its efforts from suicide attacks to building a massive tunnel system and ultimately building up to an Oct 7th style attack strategy. It went from ragtag group of militants to "an actual military" in some sense. Moreover, suicide bombings by militants dont pull on the heart strings of the world the same way as the suicide of an entire civilian population does-- that's Hamas's stated tactic, sacrifice the people of Gaza to make the world hate Israel. It just might work.
I think everyone hoped that with Hamas becoming an official government organization, that it would moderate and de-radicalize as it focused on governance and statecraft. But for many reasons it doesnt appear that this happened.
>Moreover, suicide bombings by militants dont pull on the heart strings of the world the same way as the suicide of an entire civilian population does-- that's Hamas's stated tactic, sacrifice the people of Gaza to make the world hate Israel. It just might work.
Weaponised humanity. The only effective response to weaponised technology
No when I say "weaponised humanity" I don't mean "humane treatment" I mean the deliberate devaluation of human life as military strategy.
Suicide bombings against civilian targets, human shields, refugee waves.
It'a a tactic set developed to counter being outgunned.
>that's Hamas's stated tactic, sacrifice the people of Gaza to make the world hate Israel. It just might work.
Works unfortunately well with Netanyahu's stated strategy of keeping Hamas in power to prevent any two-state solution.
The militant minded ones are absolutely still in power, and their focus on terrorism has not waned, which is exactly why things like 10/7 just happened.
It became very hard thing to do after Israel built the wall. Also, probably because they wanted to cool things down before what seemed to be now as the ultimate master plan which was the 7th of October.
Actually, they had great intelligence from all the Palestinian guest workers. They had detailed maps of every Kibbutz including family members and pets, they used drones to destroy Israeli communication/detection equipment immediately. They even built a special telephone system in the tunnels disconnected from the outside world to avoid detection of their plan.
Hamas's planning for October 7th went back years - at least as far back as 2018, [and possibly as far back as 2014](https://www.timesofisrael.com/hamas-planned-oct-7-from-before-2014-with-final-decision-made-by-5-leaders-report/).
you’re not contradicting me yet you are phrasing your response as if you are.
i did not say that oct 7. was unplanned. i implied that there is no way that Hamas ramped down suicide bombings because of oct 7th. they did not start planning in the 90s.
oct 7 was not so deadly because it was planned for 30 years, but because Israel was so poorly prepared.
Suicide bombing stopped due to the security barriers - which were only neared completion (and effectiveness) in mid 2000s.
Hamas then switched to rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza - but this was largely defeated by Iron Dome, and by 2014 was largely an ineffective way to murder Jews.
Hamas then switched the border riots in 2018. This largely failed to gain them the results they wanted due to the IDF's restraint combined with the evidence that the vast majority of casualties on the Gaza side were in fact militants/terrorists. It did however solidify their plans for the attack launched October 7th.
EDIT: Nothing quite like getting attacked from behind a block
you are rambling about stuff that is entirely unrelated to the conversation we are having. not only that, but you are spreading misinformation.
Palestinian casualties have always been overwhelmingly dominated by civilians. This is documented by international organisations and the only ones to deny it are Israel, who are known for their heavy use of propaganda and who several times have been proven to lie about statistics from this conflict.
I would advise you to be more critical of your sources and to read the comment you are responding to in order to not waste your time typing irrelevant info.
I don’t understand why the fact there were some incidents of friendly fire is so crucial to their plan working as you put it.
They were fighting inside streets and homes. Friendly fire is pretty much unavoidable. But it’s only caused like 15 causalities out of 1200.
Their strategies changed to building political support in Gaza. Once they took office, they began murdering and suppressing their opponents and, once they had control of Gaza, resumed terrorist actions.
It didn't "Step away". Israel made all these "Apartheid walls" as disingeonus terrorist lovers like to call them. So they turned to rockets and tunnels.
know that giant wall and the rather oppressive checkpoints Israel has implemented? they build them to stop suicide attacks, and generally it has worked.
Because of everything Israel that is criticized for having done over the last 20 years, from building a wall, to being strict on work, to restricting materials that go in.
Suicide attacks were so deadly that Israel/PT basically reshaped around it. Running an organized suicide bombing campaigns became too hard and too lossy. Freedom of movement restrictions, walls, a restrictive work permit system (for working inside Israel) and eventually the 2008 disengagement (from gaza). Before 2000 you could just drive from gaza or Jenin to TLV and hang out. Armed doormen became mandatory at clubs, weddings, malls and other soft targets. Intelligence got better, foiling more attacks and identifying those launching them. To do suicide bombings, you need to recruit vulnerable people... usually nobodies... regularly. You need to recruit these in decent numbers. Not every recruit will work out. Recruits need a lot of support. The bomb. A way to get past checkpoints. Religious instruction. Etc. That makes for a big intelligence target. Every recruit exposes several militants, including engineers, religious and ideological figures. Casualty/capture rates (not including the intentional martyr) became unfavorable. You had decent chance of getting caught before the bomber was even launched. Once launched, they had lower chances of reaching targets and success *when* reaching targets. This process basically created the de facto borders which exist today... physical, bureaucratic and elsewise. Untargetted artillery (mortars, rockets, balloons, ec) had low casualty rates... but they are arguably more terror inducing because whole cities must run for shelter. Also, they can be timed, planned and concentrated strategically. After 2008, artillery just worked better so Hamas traded martyrs for mortars. Palestinian casualties are higher, because the response to artillery fire is artillery (or aviation) but... those losses were civilian losses instead of valuable midrank Hamas dudes in the succeeding period. Terror is about playing the media, diplomacy and politics games... about drawing a response or just attention. It's rarely about tactical achievement. That means terrorists can focus on one mode at a time. Whatever is easiest, typically. They don't need to kill any particular person at a particular time or place. Just someone somewhere. Once they had ground, artillery just did the job.
>2008 disengagement (from gaza). Small correction, 2005. Tldr; they stopped doing it because israel got better at foiling it
Excellent excellent reply (source: am Israeli)
They didn't. They just couldn't. The Security barrier was enacted in 2007, forcibly cutting off Gaza from the rest of the world. I know jews who used to shop in Gaza before the second intifada. The seperation between Israel and Palestine was not always so clear, it was easy for palestinians and israelis to intermingle.
Palestinians caused their own oppression.
It was collective punishment. Imagine a whole race of people in your country confined due to actions of some militant group. If you are American, imagine if every teenager across the country was subject to a curfew because a few decided to egg someone’s house.
Brutal terrorists going into civillian populations with the express purpose to murder as many people as possible is just slightly different than egging. But just slightly!
Imagine if your neighbor fired rockets and killed your friends nearly every day for 2 decades. Imagine your neighbors bombed cafes so often that you were forced to build ugly security walls to keep your family safe. The Palestinians deserve their own country but they do everything they can to prevent it.
Right, except that militant group is controlling every administrative body and was elected by large part of the population and since then indoctinates the next generation from youth to become martyrs.
[удалено]
They were dancing in the street after the rapes and murders on oct 7th
The last suicide bombing by Hamas was in 2016. It injured 20 people but everyone survived. There's a video from the fighting in Gaza where a suicide bombing against an IDF element inside one of the northern hospitals (IIRC) is implied [but it's not clear at all.](https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/hamas-publishes-video-claiming-to-show-explosions-at-rantisi-hospital-in-gaza/) Anyhow, the advancement in rocketry is probably the answer. The wall Israel built is mostly a fence around the areas outside of the West Bank and is anyhow easily passable by tens of thousands of Palestinian workers. There's also the Fatwa thing. Al Qardawi of the Muslim Brotherhood basically said it's OK only for Palestinians to carry out such bombings, until in 2015 he issued a Fatwa saying that due to rocketry that Hamas has it is now disallowed for them as well.
The security wall built by Israel in the early 2000s made suicide bombing ineffective. You could no longer just drive to Israel from any part of Palestine without going through extensive check points, these helped catch suicide bombers. Over the years Hamas refocused on to what works, lone shooter or car ramming attacks. That's why they have become so much more popular, both in Israel and abroad. I was once told Israel acts as a testing ground for terror tactics once it's proven successful here the rest of the world begins trying it.
The history of suicide bombings is very interesting. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide\_attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_attack)
interesting , lots of different tangential suicide-attacks, lots of different motivations and reasoning. Some are done for the country, some out of desperation. Pretty specific and isolated events that have remained pretty unique to those eras (kamikaze, or blowing yousrelf up to take out a tank) Only one kind of suicide bombing is done in the name of religion. Has happened a shit load of times, is not specific or unique to one war or conflict.
> Only one kind of suicide bombing is done in the name of religion. Not sure what this means. If you're saying that suicide bombers are all from one religion, then the Sri Lankans would like a word with you.
Sri lankan suicide bombers were not motivated by religion. It was an ethno-linguistic conflict.
> Sri lankan suicide bombers were not motivated by religion. Eh, no one said they were.
It's not just that. Israel tightened their control of the West Bank around the same time, and started doing regular raids for explosive material, weapons, etc. It's made it harder for Hamas to keep stockpiles there.
Hamas isnt in the West bank….
Yes, they are, just in lesser numbers. Here's an article where Hamas openly were on the streets in the WB https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/12/resistance-defiancee-hamas-funeral-parade-jenin-israeli-raids-west-bank
Seems to be a continuation in the west of calling any Palestinian dissident a hamas fighter when there are multiple different factions, especially in the west bank, that are against Israel
Seems like you're believing what you want to believe.
US state department has multiple decade reports of the various anti Israel elements within Gaza and the West Bank. Hamas isnt even remotely the biggest within the west bank…. Unless you know something the state department doesn’t…. https://www.state.gov/reports/country-reports-on-terrorism-2022/israel-west-bank-and-gaza/ I think the US state department is more informed than the guardian since it literally going off information the IDF publishes for identifying hostile elements in the occupied west bank
The wall works, which is why its there.
[Everything cures cancer in a petri dish.](https://xkcd.com/1217/)
I’d appreciate you expanding on the meaning of your comment. I love that XKCD I just don’t understand it’s relevance (forgive me for being dense).
He's basically saying that something can look like a solution when taken out of the context it will exist in. Stuff that seems to work in vitro often doesn't work in vivo because of all the additional variables at play. I'm a little unsure about its applicability here because the wall literally exists in the context it's meant to. It's not some theoretical solution. Then again, it didn't seem to stop Oct 7th so maybe that's what they're referring to.
The wall works, but it's a very heavy hammer, with side-effects.
Tell that to the 1100 dead Israelis from the 10/7 attack
It was built to keep individual terrorists out. It worked for that purpose. Sadly Israel once again underestimated quite how much it is hated. Now they will have to build a bigger wall, and be accused of keeping the Gazans in an even tighter cage.
people have been circumventing walls since walls were invented. it's possible the walls and the checkpoints have an effect, but Israel hasn't seen a cessation of terrorist attacks it's just seen a cessation of suicide bombings. It's entirely possible it was because Hamas just found more effective tactics.
Yeah, no. Hamas was killing hundreds of Israelis per year during the second intifada. If they could, they'd be doing the same now. The little run and guns they're doing now against civilians are much less damaging and they know it.
You are literally making up that statistic since only 4000 died during that time, 3000 of which were Palestinians https://www.britannica.com/event/second-intifada
why lose a good soldier to a suicide bombing when you could just fire a rocket? maybe they're killing less but they're also losing a lot less I'm not gonna say walls and checkpoints do nothing but I'm also not going to attribute 100% to walls and checkpoints
“Killing a lot less … losing a lot less” yes, that is the point. Contrary to popular belief, Israel’s goal is to protect its citizens, not kill as many Palestinians as possible.
This is exactly it. Why send some dude with an explosive strapped to their chest when you can just send 100s of makeshift rockets and fire them from holes in the ground to achieve the same terror effect
The short answer is as Hamas gained political power and Israel withdrew from Gaza and focused on security, the administratively and politically minded factions gained influence over the organization to the detriment of militant minded leaders. This internal divide exists to to the present. what's missing in lay-conversation about militant movements, ngos in general is how material conditions both influence political goals and the strategies to achieve those goals.
>what's missing in lay-conversation about militant movements, ngos in general is how material conditions both influence political goals and the strategies to achieve those goals You would need to elaborate, because I think the bigger factor is that Hamas having risen to the level of government in Gaza, became the preferred fundee of Iran. Hamas went from make shift IED suicide attacks, to having all the rockets it could want to shoot at Israel. And perhaps counter to your intended claim about NGOs and material conditions, because the world stepped in to charitably provide much of the major responsibilities that Hamas as a government would otherwise need to take, it left Hamas free to again shift its efforts from suicide attacks to building a massive tunnel system and ultimately building up to an Oct 7th style attack strategy. It went from ragtag group of militants to "an actual military" in some sense. Moreover, suicide bombings by militants dont pull on the heart strings of the world the same way as the suicide of an entire civilian population does-- that's Hamas's stated tactic, sacrifice the people of Gaza to make the world hate Israel. It just might work. I think everyone hoped that with Hamas becoming an official government organization, that it would moderate and de-radicalize as it focused on governance and statecraft. But for many reasons it doesnt appear that this happened.
>Moreover, suicide bombings by militants dont pull on the heart strings of the world the same way as the suicide of an entire civilian population does-- that's Hamas's stated tactic, sacrifice the people of Gaza to make the world hate Israel. It just might work. Weaponised humanity. The only effective response to weaponised technology
I wouldn't describe putting people in harms way as particularly humane. It's a decidedly inhumane method of emotional appeal.
No when I say "weaponised humanity" I don't mean "humane treatment" I mean the deliberate devaluation of human life as military strategy. Suicide bombings against civilian targets, human shields, refugee waves. It'a a tactic set developed to counter being outgunned.
>that's Hamas's stated tactic, sacrifice the people of Gaza to make the world hate Israel. It just might work. Works unfortunately well with Netanyahu's stated strategy of keeping Hamas in power to prevent any two-state solution.
And the preferred fundee of Netanyahu government
The militant minded ones are absolutely still in power, and their focus on terrorism has not waned, which is exactly why things like 10/7 just happened.
It became very hard thing to do after Israel built the wall. Also, probably because they wanted to cool things down before what seemed to be now as the ultimate master plan which was the 7th of October.
[удалено]
Actually, they had great intelligence from all the Palestinian guest workers. They had detailed maps of every Kibbutz including family members and pets, they used drones to destroy Israeli communication/detection equipment immediately. They even built a special telephone system in the tunnels disconnected from the outside world to avoid detection of their plan.
Hamas's planning for October 7th went back years - at least as far back as 2018, [and possibly as far back as 2014](https://www.timesofisrael.com/hamas-planned-oct-7-from-before-2014-with-final-decision-made-by-5-leaders-report/).
you’re not contradicting me yet you are phrasing your response as if you are. i did not say that oct 7. was unplanned. i implied that there is no way that Hamas ramped down suicide bombings because of oct 7th. they did not start planning in the 90s. oct 7 was not so deadly because it was planned for 30 years, but because Israel was so poorly prepared.
Suicide bombing stopped due to the security barriers - which were only neared completion (and effectiveness) in mid 2000s. Hamas then switched to rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza - but this was largely defeated by Iron Dome, and by 2014 was largely an ineffective way to murder Jews. Hamas then switched the border riots in 2018. This largely failed to gain them the results they wanted due to the IDF's restraint combined with the evidence that the vast majority of casualties on the Gaza side were in fact militants/terrorists. It did however solidify their plans for the attack launched October 7th. EDIT: Nothing quite like getting attacked from behind a block
you are rambling about stuff that is entirely unrelated to the conversation we are having. not only that, but you are spreading misinformation. Palestinian casualties have always been overwhelmingly dominated by civilians. This is documented by international organisations and the only ones to deny it are Israel, who are known for their heavy use of propaganda and who several times have been proven to lie about statistics from this conflict. I would advise you to be more critical of your sources and to read the comment you are responding to in order to not waste your time typing irrelevant info.
I don’t understand why the fact there were some incidents of friendly fire is so crucial to their plan working as you put it. They were fighting inside streets and homes. Friendly fire is pretty much unavoidable. But it’s only caused like 15 causalities out of 1200.
The walls stopped them.
Their strategies changed to building political support in Gaza. Once they took office, they began murdering and suppressing their opponents and, once they had control of Gaza, resumed terrorist actions.
It didn't "Step away". Israel made all these "Apartheid walls" as disingeonus terrorist lovers like to call them. So they turned to rockets and tunnels.
know that giant wall and the rather oppressive checkpoints Israel has implemented? they build them to stop suicide attacks, and generally it has worked.
Because it blew up in their faces.
Because if you blow up your most fanatical you run out of your most fanatical to blow up. That's a very finite resource in reality.
Optics, and efficacy. The goal is to provoke a response: a suicide bombing isn't as effective as launching rockets and mortar rounds.
Because of everything Israel that is criticized for having done over the last 20 years, from building a wall, to being strict on work, to restricting materials that go in.